webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

FLOODS 2 bak

==

SEE MAIN

MERRI OK

see sea level rise

FLOOD INSURANCE CASCADE TO MORTGAGE TO ECONOMY

hurricanes

typhoons

NOTE KNOCK ON CASCADE TOXIC

see global weirding famine kid killers

see CONSP 6 WEATHER MANIP HAARP

---

9 24 TOOL

New Tool Reveals Repeated Flooding at Properties Around the U.S. - EcoWatch

---

-=-=

-=-=

ALSO HURRIC FLOOD SO-CAL?

Officials scramble to appease Trump while hurricane threatens Alabama

-=-=

-=-=

AN 9 26

In the last weeks of August, a valley in the Himalayas and a post-industrial city in the U.S. Midwest found tragic commonality. In Gary, Indiana, a powerful “derecho,” a fast-moving band of damaging thunderstorms, tore across Lake Michigan producing straight-line winds as high as 110 mph. The widespread destruction left tens of thousands of peoplewithout electricity for over two weeks, bringing global relief organizations like World Central Kitchen to the area for the first time. In Nepal, an enormous 2,000 foot wide chunk of glacier ice sheared off a mountain and plunged to the river 7,000 feet below, tearing everyone off the mountainside with it, killing over 1,000 people.

Scientists agree that both catastrophes were caused by the rise in global temperatures.

Eight thousand miles apart, as historically and culturally distinct as two areas can be, both Nepal and Gary emerged as pawns in the same oligarchs’ game of chicken: Can big oil squeeze another decade of ROI on their sunk equipment costsbefore the earth’s post-industrial temperature increases by 3.6°F (2°C)? Scientists have warned since the 1970s that an increase of 2°C will be the tipping point beyond which life on earth will change irreversibly, yet the same game of chicken persists. Fossil fuel profits have continued to soar despite the warnings— now tipping $3,000 a second— with the costs of climate change projected to hit $38 ***T***rillion annually.

The inhabitants of Gary and Nepal, like millions of people living in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Asheville, Jakarta, Delhi, Lagos, and thousands of cities, towns, and rural communities around the world are sitting pawns in a deadly game they didn’t sign up for. No one other than industry titans, fossil fuel investors, and the politicians whose campaigns they bankrolled signed up for what is happening.

Gary’s steel still runs on coal, but it doesn’t have to

I used to live in Gary; full disclosure I ran for U.S. Congress in 2020, primarily to address climate change, and got my ass kicked. Although Gary is known as a post-industrialist steel mill town with an outsized carbon footprint, Gary is also home to rare and unexpected natural habitats and exceptional beauty. The sand dunes, lagoons, and oak savannahs are as pristine as they were when Potawatomi and Miami tribes lived there.

I ran for Congress with climate change urgency most residents weren’t happy to hear. Although Gary’s steel manufacturing relies on coke and coal to fuel blast furnaces, churning out 10 million metric tons of carbon every year, those furnaces could be converted to run on hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by solar or wind, replacing coke as the reducing and heating agent. The steel could then be melted in an electric arc furnace (EAF). The whole process would produce water vapor instead of CO2 as a byproduct, which would save the steelworkers’ and the planet’s lungs.

Renewable-hydrogen steel plants also benefit from price stability, since sunlight and wind aren’t subject to the kind of volatility Trump is spreading throughout the Middle East. Early movers like Sweden’s HYBRIT project and Boston Metalhave proven that as the costs of renewable electricity keep falling, green steel will become not just cleaner but genuinely cheaper to produce at scale. This is especially true in areas with abundant solar or wind resources, and Gary is rich in both vacant land for solar and onshore winds from Lake Michigan. The only downside of converting to green steelmaking, outside the initial cost that will convert to profit in 10 years, would likely be to the local utility monopoly known as NIPSCO.

India also still burns coal, but Nepal does not

In the climate karma department, Nepal is as close to innocent as any emerging nation can be. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions despite bearing a disproportionate share of climate destruction. Nepal’s power grid is 95% supplied by clean hydropower, which is also supplemented by solar. Unlike neighboring India, the world’s third worst contributor to climate change after China and the US, Nepal does not operate coal-fired power plants.

In Nepal, traditional biomass including firewood and agricultural residue provide over 60% of overall primary energy. Biomass sources are the primary energy supply used for residential purposes including heating and cooking.

Despite their best efforts to burn clean fuel, the threat of renewed flooding still threatens Nepal, as scientists warn that debris and dammed up river channels could burst any day without warning, with over a thousand people still missing from the last event, including hundreds of foreign tourists.

Will we keep tuning out the obvious?

Every hurricane, flood, fire, disappearing habitat and river, and every sinking costal region, hastens big oil’s game of chicken toward its conclusion, one way or another. In the U.S., will the fossil-fuel aligned Supreme Court majority allow corporations to continue to destroy with no legal accountability? In India, will Prime Minister Modi continue to talk about climate justice, even as his policies create the opposite?

When my climate-focused run for office ended, a Chicago Tribune Metro editor asked if I wanted to write for them. I kept writing climate policy papers, why not use them to try to do some good? But I learned from the campaign that while many Americans are somewhat concerned about climate change, most don’t want to think about it.

Six years, hundreds of columns, and a climate justice TedTalk later, an editor from a different national paper told me that climate change, as a topic, remains unpopular.

People tune out climate change because the human brain has evolved to react to immediate, visible threats rather than slow-moving, abstract problems. The lack of personal urgency converts it to a future problem, while fossil-fuel backed organizations blame “nature” for their own malfeasance. Contemplating what’s happening to the planet also causes cognitive dissonance: it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths about modern lifestyles, which leads to more psychological numbing, and emotional shutdown instead of action.

Maybe this psychological numbing is the earth’s kindness, her way of anesthetizing us while she reduces our number. And maybe sending up a {vindictive anti-science}_ imbecile, a grotesque sadist hellbent on destroying everything— _{the planet}, world {peace}, and the {rule of law}— is just nature’s way of thinning the herd.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

---

an 11 25

Seven states are one flood away from a toxic sludge site spilling into the community.

Mother Jones reported Friday, "Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for 80 percent" of the sites. "Most of this risk is already locked in."

More than 5,500 toxic sites across the U.S. could face coastal flooding by 2100, threatening to spill contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods within the lifetimes of Generations Alpha and Beta, new research warns.

Scientists at the University of California found that a wide range of hazardous facilities are vulnerable, including sites handling sewage, toxic waste, oil, gas and other pollutants that are not fully protected from sea level rise and severe flooding.

"After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80 percent of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100," the report said.

The project examined 47,600 coastal facilities in the U.S., finding that about 5,500 are at risk of frequent flooding that could send toxic materials into nearby communities.

Current environmental safeguards do little more than delay the danger. Future generations will be forced either to build stronger containment systems that can withstand flooding or face the consequences.

“Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7 percent of sites) in the long term," the scientists found.

Read the full study at Nature Communications.

---

an 10 25

John Galgiani has been waiting for this call.

The 79-year-old physician is sitting on a chair in a side office at a health clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, long legs crammed under the table in front of him, hands folded at his stomach, when his cell phone rings. “There’s my guy,” he says.

The man on the other end, a physician who works in Tucson, is a touch less relaxed. One of his patients has been in and out of the hospital with a respiratory infection so severe that at one point she coughed up blood. Her skin is flaking, she’s losing her hair, and now the ventricles in her heart are taking too long to refill with blood between beats. The physician suspects some of these symptoms are being caused not by her underlying condition, but by the medication he has her on. The problem is, her insurance is refusing to cover a more expensive alternative.

Galgiani, the country’s leading expert on the disease they’re talking about, quickly cuts him off. Take the patient off the medication, he says, and see how she does. If she improves, show the insurance company proof and force its hand. “That’s actually a good idea,” the doctor replies.

The conversation is so routine, its conclusion — a change of medication — so anodyne, it’s easy to forget that the patient they’re talking about is battling a deadly and incurable fungus.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Doctors have been searching for a cure for coccidioidomycosis,the disease afflicting the patient, since the 1890s, when an Argentine soldier was hospitalized with skin lesions that returned with a zombie-like vengeance after being scrubbed or cut off. Not long after, an immigrant farmworker landed in a San Francisco hospital with the same mutilating disease. Both patients eventually died.

It would be decades before medical researchers and public health officials connected the dots between those cases and reports of a mysterious disease referred to simply as “desert rheumatism” by the waves of settlers, immigrants, and farmworkers that rippled through the West on the heels of the Gold Rush, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the Dust Bowl. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the disease was known as “San Joaquin Valley Fever,” and “valley fever” became the colloquial name of the infection Galgiani later dedicated his life to studying.

By the 1930s, scientists understood that valley fever and the disease that killed the two immigrant farmworkers were different stages of one illness caused by the same fungal pathogen. They had also begun to grasp the basics of transmission. The fungus that causes the disease, called coccidioides or cocci (pronounced “cox-ee”) for short, grows in the top few inches of undisturbed earth throughout the Western U.S. and flourishes during cool, rainy periods. Then, in the summertime heat of the desert, its delicate fungal threads desiccate. Once they’re dry, any disturbance of the topsoil — a foot kicking up earth, a bulldozer digging a foundation, an earthquake shaking loose clouds of dust — sends infinitesimal spores swirling into the air, where they can be sucked through the nasal passages and into the lungs of passing humans or animals.

Most people who breathe in cocci spores — about 6 in 10 — won’t develop symptoms. But the 40 percent of exposed people whose immune systems can’t or won’t fight off the fungus develop symptoms such as fatigue, muscle aches, coughing, and rash that can last weeks or months. In the 5 to 10 percent of symptomatic cases where the fungus invades the vital organs, the death rate is as high as 25 percent. The pathogen is so powerful the U.S. army weighed whether to develop it into a bioterrorism weapon in the 1960s.

Valley fever is endemic to southern Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Central and South America, but nowhere are cases of the disease more common than in Arizona. After Arizona started mandatory laboratory reporting for valley fever in 1997, registered cases ticked up and down. But the number began trending upward dramatically in 2016. Then, in 2024, cases in the state exploded, hitting their second-highest total ever. More than 15,000 infections were reported — a 37 percent increase over 2023. California, which runs just behind Arizona in its annual valley fever caseload, registered a record-breaking 12,637 cases in 2024, representing a 39 percent increase over the previous year, which had already smashed a record set in 2019.

Some portion of the rise in reported cases represents growing awareness among physicians and an associated surge in testing. The pace of new construction in untouched areas also plays a role.

But the recent increase in cases has been so dramatic, Galgiani and other researchers across the West who study the fungus think another factor may be driving the trend: supersoaker winter monsoons followed by scorching summer heat and drought, a cycle made more intense by climate change.

Because warmer air holds more moisture, monsoons and other major rainfall events pull in larger quantities of water vapor and produce heavier downpours as the planet warms. This physical fact has fueled a spate of monster floods across the U.S. and around the world in recent years. But the same warmth can conversely lead to drought by making the atmosphere “thirstier,” or capable of absorbing more water from the land’s surface. Both conditions facilitate the spread of valley fever — the wetter conditions by encouraging growth of the spores, and the drier by facilitating desiccation and soil disturbance.

....

---

an 8 25

In the southernmost town in Maryland, residents who backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election are now grappling with the consequences of his administration’s decision to cancel a major FEMA flood‑relief program.

NBC Washington published a report Thursday spotlighting former businesses now claimed by flooding.

Mayor Darlene Taylor pointed to vacant storefronts while speaking with NBC. “That was Subway and it used to have to close all the time because of floods or even high tides,” she said, nodding to a windowless shell of a building.

READ MORE:'Wild': Outrage as GOP governors facilitate controversial Trump move 'for a photo op'

She added: “There’s nothing in Crisfield that’s not touched by our flooding issue.”

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

The report noted that Taylor leads a shrinking seaside town battling relentless flooding from the Chesapeake Bay and other climate‑related threats.

Last year, FEMA awarded a $36 million grant through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program to flood‑proof Crisfield. But in April, the Trump administration abruptly terminated the BRIC program — canceling applications from 2020‑2023 and halting future awards.

Due to this development, Taylor and other townspeople are forced to scramble for alternatives — to “get it back.”

Records show a majority of voters in the town supported Trump in 2024, per the report.

“In an article that someone sent to me, it says, ‘Crisfield: Maryland’s Trumpiest city,” Taylor told NBC.

Taylor’s efforts to secure federal flood relief began early in her tenure — she took office in 2022 amid mounting concern from residents about rising water levels. With Crisfield only a few feet above sea level, flooding has hollowed out the local economy and left residents increasingly vulnerable.

When asked how voters felt about the canceled funding, despite their ideological leanings, Taylor noted, “People are tied to their philosophies and ideologies. So, they may see rationales in one way or another, but for me, I believe that that should play in our favor.”

Francis Martinez Myers, a member of of the Greater Crisfield Action Coalition, told NBC: “I feel like the government, the administration turned their back on the community."

SEE DOGE CUTS FEMA NWS NOAA TEXAS 7 25 GIRLS SUMMER CAMP KIA

UP COAL SUBSIDY, SOLAR AND WIND ARE LEGALLY NO LONGER ENERGY b3

mma

Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts touted a decrease in weather-related deaths. The decrease is partially due to NOAA, an agency Project 2025 wants to dismantle.

09/26/24

As “life-threatening” Hurricane Helene approached Florida, the Miami Herald called out Project 2025's proposal to dismantle NOAA

09/27/24

//

mma 6 24

project 2025 plans to dismantle the federal agency that tracks hurricanes

Right-wing media have attacked NOAA and climate science for decades

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 05/31/24

:{:{The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”}:

But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat.}:

Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.

Speaking to The Guardian, former NOAA official Andrew Rosenberg said the agency “basically reports the science as the scientific evidence accumulates and has been quite cautious about reporting climate effects,” adding, “It’s not pushing some agenda.” And meteorologist Chris Gloninger said Project 2025’s recommendations are “a sign that the far right has ‘no interest in climate truth.’” E&E News, [4/10/24; The Guardian, 4/26/24]}:

---

---

mma

From the July 10, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Briefing with Jen Psaki

In Florida, it seems that one government official isn’t just nodding to the conspiracy theory; he appears to be embracing it. On July 14, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote a letter to all public airports in the state warning them that “injecting our atmosphere” with chemicals for the purpose of influencing the weather is banned and that “violators of this law are guilty of third degree felonies and fines as high as $100,000.” In the letter, he also suggests “weather modification could have played a role” in the Texas floods, and specifically mentions cloud seeding.

These wild claims didn’t come out of thin air. Conspiracy theorists have repeatedly alleged that the government and private companies are creating extreme weather through cloud seeding, a type of geoengineering used to combat drought and enhance precipitation. Some have also claimed that weather monitoring systems are “weather weapons,” and that condensation trails from planes are actually dangerous chemicals.

Proponents of these conspiracy theories include Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has claimed that geoengineering is “probably as dangerous to us as climate change itself” and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who proposed a bill that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperate, climate, or sunlight intensity.”

On a July 12 segment of CNN This Morning Weekend, host Victor Blackwell asked Monica Medina, the former principal deputy administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to react to the congresswoman’s claims about weather manipulation and to the EPA’s new webpages. Medina said, “There is nothing about this storm that was controlled by scientific experiments regarding geoengineering. … This kind of disinformation leads people to think that every part of the warning system can’t be trusted at a moment when they have to move quickly."

Video

Citation

From the July 12, 2025, edition of CNN This Morning Weekend

Psaki echoed Medina, pointing out, “There is zero, zero evidence that cloud seeding had anything to do with the Texas floods, and scientists emphasize that this relatively young technology simply cannot produce the kind of rainfall that caused the Texas flooding.”

Indeed, scientists have explained that what conspiracy theorists refer to as “chemtrails” are actually harmless trails of condensation or contrails, and that it’s “extremely unlikely” that cloud seeding could result in a large-scale disaster like the one in Texas.

Despite Zeldin’s confusing messaging, the EPA’s new webpage confirms what we already knew about contrails and says that “EPA is not aware of any scientific evidence that supports any claim that any nefarious activities are taking place.”

Nonetheless, “nod[s] to conspiracy theorists” can have real world consequences. Psaki explained how “in Oklahoma, far-right extremists took credit for damaging a local news station's weather radar, falsely claiming that the technology used to track weather events was actually some kind of weather weapon.”

The station that was attacked linked the event to “rhetoric” from the anti-government group Veterans on Patrol, which also caused chaos during the response to Hurricane Helene last fall.

Conspiracy theories distract from legitimate questions about FEMA’s response in Texas

Psaki contextualized the focus on conspiracy theories by digging into the real issue at play, which is how recent cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency may have hindered the response to the floods.

She covered several contentious findings, including a CNN report that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem created an emergency funding bottleneck by ruling that all expenses over $100,000 have to be directly approved by her.

Psaki also mentioned a Talking Points Memo reportthat Noem canceled “a $3 million grant for improving communications between national and local authorities during natural disasters” even as rescue efforts in Texas were ongoing.

Fox News has pushed back against this type of reporting, lambasting Democrats and the media for connecting the disaster to the Trump administration's policies. But the network not only politicized extreme weather tragedies under former President Joe Biden, in the case of Hurricane Helene, also pushed harmful misinformation that hindered relief operations.

Many factors likely contributed to the tragic impacts of the Texas flood, including decisions made by state lawmakers and local officials, as well as a failure to adequately consider flood maps when building infrastructure. But as Psaki observed at the end of the segment, “This is not how a functioning government responds to crises or prepares to respond to crises, that's for sure.”

---

---

an 6 24

The "most-deprived" areas across the planet are in facing a land crisis, BBC reports, according to the World Food Programme.

Due to droughts and flooding, the organization's global office director Martin Frick told BBC, that because "the land can no longer sustain crops" in some places, there are "zero" harvests left as a result.

Furthermore, Frick warns that "that without efforts to reverse land degradation globally, richer countries would also begin to suffer crop failures" as well.

READ MORE: Don't say 'climate': Ron DeSantis signs bill removing references from state law

Frick noted that "as a father of three, he was 'not a fan of doomsday scenarios', but admitted that 'what we are seeing is most worrying,'" BBC reports.

The World Food Program director, however, offered a glimpse of hope by arguing that it's still possible for countries to move "toward localised farming that seeks to reinvigorate the land."

Still, BBC reports, "Meanwhile, flash floods in Afghanistan earlier this year are estimated to have destroyed 24,000 hectares of land already considered highly degraded. Environmentalists expect that as soil degrades, failing crops will strain global food supplies and increase migration from affected areas."

READ MORE:Is wastewater an answer for adapting to climate change?

Frick emphasized, "There's too much carbon in the air and too little carbon in the soils. With every inch of soil that you're growing, you're removing enormous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. So healthy soils – carbon-rich soils – are a prerequisite to fixing climate change."

Save Soil chief science officer Praveen Sridhar told the news outlet, "It's going to be disaster for human beings. It’s going to be like Mad Max."

Shrihar added, "There will be no humanity. There will be no charity. There will be no fairness... The only thing that lets you be will be survival."

*BBC's full report is available at this link.

---

---

an 3 23

ft. Lauderdale, Florida was recently pounded by torrential rain and severe flooding. And according to WPLG-TV Local 10 (Ft. Lauderdale's NBC affiliate), some residents are criticizing Gov. Ron DeSantis for not showing up and seeing the damage in person.

WPLG reporter Andrew Perez notes that although DeSantis "sent help" to Ft. Lauderdale, homeowners affected by the flooding are wondering if the Republican governor has been distracted by a possible presidential campaign.

Cheryl Lovejoy, a Ft. Lauderdale homeowner, told WPLG, "I don't think they realize how bad it is. Our whole house is devastated. I've got elderly and sick people still in the home. I'm waiting on insurance to kick in. Still no funds yet. I haven't heard from anybody."

READ MORE:New analysis sheds light on billionaire GOP donor’s questionable commitment to DeSantis

Lovejoy also told the station, "He's the governor. This is our home. This is what he governs. He should be interested and on point with what's going on here."

Although the Florida governor has yet to make an official announcement, he appears to be gearing up for a presidential run. And if he enters the 2024 presidential primary, he will be competing in a field that includes former President Donald Trump — the frontrunner, according to polls — Nikki Haley (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and talk radio host Larry Elder.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis signs six-week abortion ban into law

View WPLG Local 10's full report at this link.

---

---

wildfire plus rain = mud slide

mma 1 23

bomb cyclone and mult atmos rivers!

According to The Washington Post,“While storms like this do periodically occur, heavy precipitation rates are made more likely by the effects of human-induced climate change, which is warming the atmosphere.”

However, a review of coverage by national TV news from December 31 through January 4 of the first atmospheric river that hit California and the second atmospheric river, whichtriggereda “bomb cyclone,” found that with one exception, cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — and national broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — failed to link these events to our warming climate.

TV News failed to explain how climate change is making precipitation events, like those that have flooded parts of California, more severe and more frequent

Print and online news sources have contextualized the extreme weather events devastating California:

But TV news largely failed to explain how climate change is fueling these storms.

Of the 60 segments aired by national TV news networks from December 31 through January 4, 2023, only 1 mentioned climate change.

Cable news — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — aired a total of 33 combined segments on the California rain. CNN covered the storms the most, with 24 segments, followed by Fox News with 8 and MSNBC with a single segment. CNN was the only network to air a segment linking climate change to the storms impacting California. 

In an exchange between CNN anchor Kate Bolduan and San Francisco Mayor London Breed on the January 4 edition of At This Hour,the two discussed the ongoing impacts of climate change on California, including its historic drought and worsening wildfires, and concluded that preparation for the climate crisis is not a future exercise but an imperative for a crisis that is unfolding now. [cnn vid]

Extreme weather has become a year-round phenomenon not limited to the heat and megastorms that usually peak over a few months of the year. In 2022, wildfires torched Texas, months before peak U.S. wildfire summer season, destructive unseasonable tornadoes caused chaos in New Orleans and across parts of Texas, and an ice shelf the size of Rome collapsed in Antarctica after temperatures reached 70 degrees above normal in March. Even the hurricane that leveled Florida hit later in the season than storms of that magnitude usually do.

These supercharged winter storms should also be presented as an impact of our increasingly warming planet. However, climate coverage is still concentrated around the summer and fall months that have traditionally constituted peak extreme weather season, with events outside of this period often left isolated instead of covered as part of the broader landscape of global climate events. The scope of how climate change impacts weather events is expanding, and TV news coverage needs to expand with it.

---

---

https://www.eenews.net/articles/growing-storms-push-shrinking-la-insurers-into-failure/

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/national-tv-news-coverage-pakistans-historic-devastating-flooding-largely-lacked

9 22

---

---

yikes floods AND drought and glacier water?! and nukes?! pakistan

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/climate-dystopia-at-our-doorstep/

---

---

an 8 22 almost a foot by 2100

The fossil fuel-driven climate emergency has already locked in so much ice melt in Greenland that sea levels will surge by nearly a foot in the coming decades, peer-reviewed research published Monday warns, underscoring the need to rapidly transform virtually all aspects of the global political economy.

Even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the Greenland ice sheet is set to lose at least3.3% of its mass, or 110 trillion tons of ice, and that will cause almost a foot in global sea-level rise (SLR), says the study, published in Nature Climate Change. The authors don't specify a time frame for the melting and SLR, though they expect much of it to happen between now and 2100.

But rather than lead to despair, this projection of inevitable damage—made by scientists based at institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States—should catalyze immediate and robust climate action, experts stress. Without it, the life-threatening situation confronting humanity is destined to grow far deadlier.

Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that sea levels along the U.S. coastline would rise by an average of 10 to 12 inches by 2050, drastically increasing the threat of flooding in dozens of highly populated cities.

By mid-century, 150 million people worldwide could be displaced from their homes just by rising sea levels, according to some estimates. The consequences of a one-foot SLR would be especially catastrophic for developing island nations, where low elevation and high poverty combine to increase vulnerability.

These countries, which have done little to cause the climate crisis now roasting the Greenland ice sheet, lack the financial resources for adaptation and face the prospect of being wiped off the map.

"Every study has bigger numbers than the last," William Colgan, a scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and co-author of the new paper, told The Washington Post. "It's always faster than forecast."

As lead author Jason Box, also from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told the newspaper, the finding that 3.3% of Greenland's ice sheet will be gone in a matter of decades regardless of what is done to halt planet-heating pollution represents "a minimum, a lower bound."

Things are all but guaranteed to get worse if humanity continues to burn fossil fuels. Should the record-breaking ice loss that occurred in 2012 become the norm, for example, the world is likely to see around two-and-a-half feet of SLR from Greenland alone, the study says.

By the same token, each fraction of a degree of warming that is avoided makes a difference.

If Greenland's ice sheet were to disintegrate completely, sea levels would rise more than 22 feet—"enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world's largest coastal cities" by the end of the century, scientists have warned, so the stakes for adequate climate action are still immense even if a certain amount of melting and SLR has been deemed irreversible.

Greenland is located in the Arctic, which has been heating up for over a century and is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. Dangerous feedback loops are of particular concern. The replacement of reflective sea ice with dark ocean water leads to greater absorption of solar energy, and the thawing of permafrost portends the release of additional carbon dioxide and methane—both leading to accelerated temperature rise that triggers further melting, defrosting, and destabilization.

In December, researchers estimated that the Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the rest of the globe over the past three decades. Another recent study found that 2021 was the 25th consecutive year in which Greenland's ice sheet lost more mass during the melting season than it gained during the winter. Rainfall is now projected to become more common in the Arctic than snowfall decades sooner than previously expected.

This context has a direct bearing on the new paper, which contains more dire predictions than other reports relying on different assumptions.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for instance, has projected that Greenland will lose roughly 1.8% of its mass and contribute up to half a foot of SLR by 2100 if humans continue spewing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"One reason that new research appears worse than other findings may just be that it is simpler," the Postexplains. "It tries to calculate how much ice Greenland must lose as it recalibrates to a warmer climate."

"In the past, scientists have tried to determine what Greenland's ongoing melting means for the global sea level through complex computer simulations," the newspaper continues. "They model the ice itself, the ocean around it, and the future climate based on different trajectories of emissions." The result, in general, has been "less alarming predictions."

As the Post reports:

The new research 'obtains numbers that are high compared to other studies,' said Sophie Nowicki, an expert on Greenland at the University at Buffalo who contributed to the IPCC report. Nowicki observed, however, that one reason the number is so high is that the study considers only the last 20 years—which have seen strong warming—as the current climate to which the ice sheet is now adjusting. Taking a 40-year period would yield a lower result, Nowicki said.

[...]

Box, for his part, argues that the models upon which the IPCC report is based are 'like a facsimile of reality,' without enough detail to reflect how Greenland is really changing. Those computer models have sparked considerable controversy recently, with one research group charging they do not adequately track Greenland's current, high levels of ice loss.

For example, the processes causing ice loss from large glaciers in Greenland "often occur hundreds of meters below the sea surface in narrow fjords, where warm water can flick at the submerged ice in complex motions," the newspaper notes. "In some cases, these processes may simply be playing out at too small a scale for the models to capture."

Pennsylvania State University professor Richard Alley, an ice sheet expert who was not involved in the study, told the Post that "the problems are deeply challenging, will not be solved by wishful thinking, and have not yet been solved by business-as-usual."

One thing that's certain, Alley added, is that higher temperatures will lead to greater amounts of SLR.

"[The] rise can be a little less than usual projections, or a little more, or a lot more, but not a lot less," he said.

---

---

2 22

new big scary drought study on PBS, alternet; dry earth does not absorb wet years well so takes long to recover?

we will have more warm years than wet ones, trend is drier (but wet will be wetter?)

noaa says 1 ft sea level rise by 2050

---

---

1120 ew

large landslide caused by torrential rains during Hurricane Eta buried half a small village's residents, leaving the other half searching for family members and neighbors in Guatemala on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported.

Officials deemed Queja, a farming community of a few hundred residents, "uninhabitable," and ended rescue operations, calling for the survivors to abandon the area now mostly covered in tons of rock and mud. 99 people were reported missing, with 44 confirmed deaths.

Mayor Ovidio Choc, representing the San Cristobal Verapaz region, including Queja, said the evacuated village would be declared a cemetery.

The former director of Guatemala's national disaster management agency said the country is ranked among the highest risk countries for natural disasters, based on data by the World Risk Index.

"It is a structural problem that is linked not only the threat or the probability of producing elements like Eta, but rather other factors that make us vulnerable and are directly tied to the development of the country," Alejandro Maldonado said, The Washington Post reported.

The inability to invest in mitigation plans, and deforestation were likely to be circumstances that caused the landslide, noted Maldonado.

The residents of Queja are the latest addition of what is being called the "great climate migration." Climate change is causing sea level rise and extreme weather conditions, such as intense heat, drought, wildfires and enlarged hurricanes and typhoons, which induce mudslides, landslides and flooding, forcing many to flee their homes, never to return.

And climate refugees are predicted to increase in number in the coming years as more natural disasters occur. According to Ecological Threat Register, a September 2020 report by the non-profit think tank Institute for Economics & Peace, one billion people live in areas were there is not enough infrastructure in place to combat ecological changes.

2020 already claims the largest number of hurricanes and wildfires ever recorded.

Eta first made landfall just south of Puerto Cabezas, a city on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast on Nov. 3, as a Category 4 hurricane, causing 140 mph winds, massive downpours and destructive flooding to several countries in Central America, including Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras.

Hurricane Eta is expected to hit Florida's Gulf Coast in its fourth landfall on Wednesday, as a Category 1 hurricane, bumped up from a subtropical storm with rains hitting southern Florida on Sunday and Monday. While diminished in intensity from its peak in Central America, landslides and flooding are expected.

---

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-could-add-3-metres-sea-level-rise

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

By Charlotte HartleyJul. 23, 2020 , 11:30 AM

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in more danger of collapsing than previously thought, National Geographic reports. The ice sheet is the world’s largest, holding 80% of the planet’s ice. But some 400,000 years ago, a large chunk about the size of Arizona collapsed into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise by more than 3 meters. The worrying thing is that this happened during a period of relatively mild warmth, according to a study published yesterday in Nature. And it could happen again.

At the time of the previous collapse, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached about 300 parts per million (ppm). It now stands at 400 ppm. The researchers say this has caused them to re-evaluate the perceived “invincibility” of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and seriously consider the possibility of it shrinking. These findings are consistent with estimates of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting elsewhere on the continent and around the world.

==

==

720 ew

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Tuesday that a trend of increased coastal flooding will continue to worsen as the climate crisis escalates.

==

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01062020/extreme-rain-study-climate-change

620 icn

new Study Shows Global Warming Intensifying Extreme Rainstorms Over North America

BY BOB BERWYN

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/:{cyclone:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:-amphan-india-bangladesh-2646063894.html

---

==

320 ecuador indig

---

Greenland experienced an unusually warm summer in 2019, which caused the world's largest island to lose 600 billion tons of ice and raised sea levels by 0.2 of an inch, according to a NASA study released yesterday. That amount of ice loss more than doubled Greenland's 2002-2019 annual average.

---

noaa 23 states, not as bad as last year?

https://www.ecowatch.com/flooding-forecast-us-2645547901.html

==

https://theconversation.com/atmospheric-river-storms-can-drive-costly-flooding-and-climate-change-is-making-them-stronger-128902

==

primary 1/20 bak

see also sea level rise

see hurricanes

affect mil bases

global weirding chaos

==

Indonesia Seeds Clouds After Flooding Kills 43

CLIMATE CRISIS

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{After nearly 15 inches of rain fell in one day and caused flash floods and landslides in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, that destroyed 60,000 homes and killed at least 43 people, the Indonesian Air Force sent two planes to drop salt on approaching rain clouds to break them up before they reached the city, according to }:Reuters:{.}::{}:

}:

==

New York City Spends Billions on Flood Protection

FLOODING

18 minutes ago

==

==

jet stream:

icn 1219

...It played out in real time on TV and in newspaper headlines about droughts,floods,heat extremes and wildfires—an "unprecedented hemisphere-wide pattern," Mann said. "It played a key role in the large-scale jet pattern we saw in late July, associated with deep stagnant high pressure centers over California and Europe."

That brought blazing temperatures and wildfire conditions to California, flooding over the Eastern U.S. and unprecedented heat to the Scandinavian Arctic region, as well as a six-month heat wave and drought across parts of Central Europe, all events showing a clear global warming fingerprint, according to scientists.

The new study focuses on summer extremes, while other research has looked at how global warming affects the jet stream in winter.

What Happens in the Arctic Doesn't Stay There

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved with the new research, said the study has some "compelling new evidence on the link between amplified Arctic warming and extreme mid-latitude weather during the summer months."

What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay there. Increased melting of reflective sea ice in summer exposes more dark-colored ocean to absorb heat, and that heats the surrounding land. As Arctic warming races ahead of the rest of the global average, the temperature contrasts that drive the jet stream are reduced, and the river of wind more frequently twists into sharp and slow-moving or stationary waves.

"When the jet stream enters this wavy state, extreme weather tends to occur on either side of the amplified ridges and troughs as the storm track becomes locked in place," Swain said. Then, specific regions experience long periods of cool and stormy or, contrarily, hot and dry weather, he added.

---

==

icn 1219

Atmospheric Rivers Fuel Most Western U.S. Flooding. Climate Change Will Make Them Worse.

---

Appalachia’s Strip-Mined Mountains Face a Growing Climate Risk: Flooding

BY: JAMES BRUGGERS

A new analysis of satellite images shows how the area of West Virginia with the most strip-mine damage is also the most susceptible to increased stream flow as the planet warms

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

}:

==

==

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/10/kentuckys-leaders-are-siding-with-the-coal-industry-and-its-poorest-residents-are-paying-a-price/

no lnx

ENVIRONMENT

OCTOBER 28, 2019

Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price

“If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”

RACHEL LEVEN

ZACH GOLDSTEIN

Joanna Eberts

This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

Todd Bentley stepped onto his porch and saw the storm swelling the creek near his home. If this kept up all night, he feared, the creek could overflow its banks and wash out his neighborhood’s road. He headed out into the rain with his teenage son to secure his mother’s trailer across the street.

In minutes—before they could finish—they were up to their waists in floodwater. They had to clamber into the hills to escape. There they crouched for hours in their family cemetery, lightning striking around them, the water below them carrying cars, ripping up pavement and lifting homes off foundations.

“He started crying on me, it was happening so fast, and I, literally, I shook him,” Bentley recalled. “I said, ‘Son, listen. We’re fighting for our lives now—you’ve got to keep it together.’”

Nine years after they survived the flood, storms fill Bentley with dread. He watches the creek. He paces.

What if it happens again?

Flash floods have troubled Kentucky for decades. Now, extreme rainstorms are worsening with climate change, increasing the odds of more disasters like the one Bentley’s community endured. For Kentucky’s poorest residents, the people living in flood-prone hollows with surface mines nearby, that means an ever-present threat to both life and hard-won possessions.

But the state isn’t on the front lines of the fight against global warming. Its leaders, concerned about the impact on coal, have positioned themselves on the other side of that battle.

That’s created a dangerous and expensive disconnect—and not just in Kentucky, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows.

Nine of the 10 states that emit the most heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution per person helped block the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have been the largest effort by the U.S. government to limit climate change. Four of those states, including Kentucky, were among those most often hit by disasters in the past 10 years—generally powerful storms, which science shows are worsening as the planet warms.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it sent nearly $2 billion in taxpayer aid to those four states over the same period to clean up and prepare for future hits. That accounts for two of FEMA’s major programs, just part of the disaster aid flowing to states.

Kentucky alone received more than $530 million from 2009 to 2018. Severe storms and floods accounted for most of its 16 federally declared major disasters. Half of those battered Pike County, home to a quarter of the state’s active coal mines in 2018 and to Bentley’s neighborhood.

The choices that state leaders make now will have life-changing consequences for generations, experts warn. Michael Hendryx, a public health professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies environmental justice, said he wonders whether officials promoting inaction truly think global warming is not an emergency or are simply making a cynical bet that they won’t be harmed.

“They’ll be the people who have the money and power to defend themselves as climate change gets worse,” he said. “If we don’t do something really powerful and really meaningful soon, then the people who live in vulnerable areas … will suffer the most.”

In some parts of Kentucky, residents say they believe the state’s treatment of coal has increased the risk of disasters in yet another way. Consider the Harless Creek flood that threatened Bentley’s life. Water rushing down the hills from mines—including one the state had allowed to operate on an expired permit—intensified damage from the pounding rain, according to an engineering study prepared for a lawsuit. Afterward, the state cited two companies for violating laws intended to protect people living nearby.

The Kentucky governor’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. John Mura, a spokesman for the state’s mine regulator, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, wrote in an email that the agency concluded the mines above Harless Creek did not contribute to flood damage. But both the agency and the companies settled lawsuits filed by people living along the creek.

The state now has a system in place to prevent companies from mining with expired permits, Mura wrote.

“The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet has worked with mining companies to increase safety practices while it has been extremely diligent in holding permit holders accountable to their permit obligations,” he wrote.

Harless Creek was one of at least three cases in Kentucky in which engineering studies found that inappropriately operated or cleaned-up mines worsened flood damage, said Jack Spadaro, a former federal mine regulator who served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits about those incidents. The floods collectively killed at least one person and destroyed the homes or belongings of more than 250 residents, according to news reports.

But the problem is far more widespread than just those three cases, Spadaro said. And the areas around mines tend to be poor, making recovery much harder for the people living there.

“When they lose their house,” he said, “they lose everything.”

‘Misguided reasons’

In September, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevinstepped up to the lectern in a historic downtown Louisville hotel to deliver the keynote speech at an energy conference for leaders from southern states.

Days before, dozens of countries and businesses committed to swift action to stem the climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Demonstrators turned out in cities around the world, including Louisville, to demand that elected officials do better. But at the Louisville conference, sponsored by oil, gas, coal and electric-utility interests, speakers suggested that the causes of global warming are uncertain. Bevin called people pushing for climate action irrational. His message: Leave fossil fuels alone.

“We are prematurely abandoning our [fossil fuel] assets for what I feel—and I think it’s probably shared by others—may be misguided reasons,” said Bevin, a Republican whose state is the country’s fifth-largest coal producer.

In fact, the science is clear: What’s happening to the planet is different from the natural variability of past eras, when Earth gradually warmed and cooled as its orbit shifted. The world has never in recorded history been so warm, or warmed this fast, U.S. and international research shows. Most of that change occurred in the past 35 years, triggered by decades of heat-trapping, man-made emissions, the federal government says. Burning fossil fuels such as coal is the primary cause, according to decades of scientific studies.

Kentucky’s lung-damaging sulfate pollution, pumped out by sources such as coal power plants, used to partially shield the state from warming because the particles reflected sunlight into space. Those emissions have plummeted. For two decades now, temperatures in the state have risen.

Scientists say the consequences include more heavy downpours. Kentucky storms dumping at least 2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period—storms that pose a flood risk—have increased 20 percent since the early 20th century, said Kenneth Kunkel, lead scientist for technical support for the federal government’s National Climate Assessment.

“We see very strong evidence for extreme rainfall increases across the eastern U.S.,” he said.

Kentucky disasters often hurt poorer areas. For example, more than half the counties hit by federally declared major disasters from 2009 to 2018 had larger shares of households receiving federal food aid than the state overall.

That’s a common problem nationwide, one the federal disaster relief system doesn’t effectively address, said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator. Congress didn’t set up FEMA to account for inequalities that precede disasters, such as homelessness and poverty, he said.

“The system was built for the middle income,” Fugate said. “If you’re poor, the system is not designed to make you whole.”

In Kentucky, Bevin’s administration is basing its preparations for disasters on climate science, even as he casts doubt on it. A 2018 state flood risk assessment, citing a 2017 federal study about climate effects in the region, warns that flooding events are likely to become more frequent and severe.

At the same time, the state continues to push for the status quo on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In September, Bevin intervened in court to support the Trump administration’s “pro-coal” replacement to Obama’s climate rule—a substitute that projections by the independent research group Resources for the Future suggest would reduce U.S. climate-warming emissions just one-tenth of a percent by 2050.

Bevin is up for re-election Nov. 5. His opponent, Democrat Andy Beshear, acknowledges climate change is happening but also pushed for the demise of the Clean Power Plan — a rule put in place by the Obama administration—and has supported its replacement.

Planning for climate-worsened disasters, as Kentucky is doing, can save money and lives. Flooding is already the state’s “most frequent and costly natural hazard,” killing 41 people over a recent 11-year period and causing an average of $40 million in annual losses, according to the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.

But simply planning won’t be enough, experts caution.

It will be impossible to protect people and infrastructure from climate change in the long term without also reining in—what scientists call mitigating—heat-trapping emissions, said Lynne Carter, a Louisiana State University adjunct professor.

“Right now, we’re … incrementally coping. We’re not even coping very well,” said Carter, a co-author of the most recent National Climate Assessment, released by the Trump administration. “If we don’t do any mitigation, the problem is going to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Kentucky isn’t the only state preparing for the very climate disasters its policies help fuel.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, leads a state that emits more carbon dioxide per person than all but two others; he says he doubts the science that man-made fossil fuel emissions are warming the planet.

Meanwhile, his emergency managers are planning for a future of more rain and landslides triggered by climate change.

In Nebraska, the state with the ninth-highest carbon dioxide emissions per person, Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ administration has questioned whether climate science is settled while relying on a hazard mitigation plan calling climate change “an increasingly important factor” in local risks.

Like the Kentucky governor’s office, Bevin’s campaign spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for Beshear, Bevin’s challenger and Kentucky’s attorney general, wrote in an email that all energy sources are needed to address the planet’s warming—he did not say how that would lower greenhouse gases—and the right strategy would provide jobs for Kentuckians.

“Mining plays an important role supporting Eastern and Western Kentucky families,” Sam Newton, the Beshear campaign spokesman, wrote in an email. “Andy is on Team Kentucky, which means he’ll fight policies that hurt Kentucky families and work with anyone to help Kentucky families.”

The offices of the West Virginia and Nebraska governors didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

There’s a cost to ignoring climate science. U.S. taxpayers already have begun paying it.

Seven states—all of which opposed the climate-focused Clean Power Plan—account for more than a third of FEMA spending to help communities rebuild after and adapt for natural disasters in the past 10 years, according to figures from the agency. Those states, including Texas and Florida, received $21 billion between them.

‘Ticking time bombs’

Small and seemingly benign, Harless Creek meanders beside a road that shares its name. Homes sit nearby between two mountains—Todd Bentley’s among them.

On a sunny day in June, his family gathered at his mother’s hair salon, a white-paneled house with a wooden porch that overlooks the creek.

Around a coffee table cluttered with newspaper clippings and photos of the flood, they remembered Bentley’s grandmother escaping up the mountain that night in 2010 in her pajamas, a quilt over her head. His mother, Janie Caudill, racing back from Tennessee, stopping only to pick up rubber boots. Residents shining flashlights across the creek to signal that they were alive.

The next day, Caudill’s uncle, Bill Blackburn, stopped by on the way to his house. He lived in the hollow and also hadn’t been there during the storm.

“He said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go home … I’ve got the keys right here in my pocket,’” Caudill remembered. “We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he didn’t have a door there to unlock.”

Pike County has a history of flash floods. Officials here cut a mountain in two in the 1970s so they could reroute the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River to avoid flooding, a $78 million operation that was one of the largest land movements in the Western hemisphere. But Harless Creek took everyone aback.

Seven inches of rain fell between 4 p.m. July 17, 2010, and 1 a.m. the next day. By 8:40 p.m., Harless Creek was over its banks, transforming into a torrent. The floodwaters damaged, destroyed and in some cases carried off more than 100 people’s property: homes, vehicles, sheds. In a county where nearly 30 percent of residents live in poverty, it represented an especially heavy loss.

The amount of rain the storm dumped was brutal, but Bentley and other residents suspected that nearby coal mines played a significant role in the flood. They hired lawyer Ned Pillersdorf, who asked an engineering firm to investigate.

The firm’s findings: The operations of two companies’ mines in the mountains above the neighborhood increased the size and speed of the flood. That’s because unstable dirt and rock surfaces exposed through mining sent more water downhill instead of absorbing it, Spadaro said. Forty-four percent more water rushed into the area, the firm concluded, increasing the “destructive energy of the flood waters.”

On behalf of the people with property damage, Pillersdorf sued both mines’ owners, Cambrian Coal and AEP Kentucky Coal. The businesses’ failure to follow mining rules worsened the flood and residents’ losses from the incident, he alleged in the lawsuit. The companies settled over the next two years, the amounts confidential.

Then Pillersdorf went after the party Bentley’s family thinks ultimately is at fault: the state of Kentucky.

First he sued the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, alleging the agency didn’t properly enforce mining rules — endangering residents—and demanding the state do its job. In 2014, the agency agreed to a confidential settlement and brought in federal investigators to ensure the mines complied with the law.

He later filed another claim against the state. Harless Creek residents requested payment from Kentucky’s claims board, asserting that the energy cabinet’s negligence increased their flood losses, but the cabinet argued that these claims were filed too late. An appellate court recently agreed with the state. The Kentucky Supreme Court is considering whether to review the decision.

Sitting inside his first-floor office in Prestonsburg, west of Pike County, Pillersdorf said it doesn’t surprise locals that companies would ignore mining rules to save money.

“What they don’t understand is, why is the state so damn indifferent to how dangerous these ticking time-bombs are?” he said.

After the storm, the state issued citations to Cambrian Coal for violations that included mining without a permit, inappropriate cleanup and poorly designed and operated sediment ponds, which are intended to capture soil moved during operations. The penalty, after Cambrian Coal appealed, was eventually set at about $50,000. The state cited AEP Kentucky Coal for improper conditions that led to mudslides, fining the company $400.

U.S. taxpayers paid more than five times those combined penalties—almost $300,000—just to rebuild Harless Creek Road, according to federal data obtained by Public Integrity.

AEP Kentucky Coal maintains it didn’t contribute to the flood. The state mine regulator’s spokesman agreed. The residents’ engineering firm did not. While the company settled, it did not admit liability and only “participated in the settlement to promote a prompt conclusion to the case,” AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry wrote in an email.

Listen to a radio version of this story here:

Cambrian Coal didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did Booth Energy, which previously owned the company.

Bentley’s family has far more complicated feelings about the mine owners than about the state’s handling of the situation.

Bentley’s son, Tyler, now 24, is a coal miner. So were Bentley’s father and grandfather, and Bentley himself, before an accident on the job in 2002 left him unable to work. Judi Casalino, his aunt, used to be a sales executive for a coal company.

“It’s hard for me,” she said. “I know that coal mining had a whole lot to do with what happened up here,” but she couldn’t help but also think of Cambrian Coal’s economic impact.

She pointed to Jim Booth, who’d long run the company: “That one man employs 500-something people right now in eastern Kentucky, so let’s give him credit where credit’s due. If he weren’t in the business, it’d be a whole lot of people would have no jobs.”

Just days before, though Casalino didn’t know it, Booth had resigned as a director and shareholder at the company. Shortly afterward, Cambrian Coal and related businesses filed for bankruptcy protection. As of early October, the company owed local governments and schools more than $1 million in unpaid taxes, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

Today, the mines that settled with neighbors over the flood have been cleaned up, according to the state. But people here remain shaken.

One neighbor sleeps in her clothes every night “because she’s afraid she might have to get out,” Caudill said, while Bentley, his stepfather and his son “get really paranoid” if there’s a storm brewing. Some people are gone: They couldn’t bear to live here after the flood.

And Blackburn, the uncle who didn’t have the door to lock? Two years afterward, he was dead.

“He grieved himself to death,” Caudill said. “He just couldn’t deal with what he’d lost.”

The powerful and the powerless

Five days after Cambrian Coal settled the lawsuit brought by Harless Creek residents, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., delivered a tribute on the Senate floor to a fellow Kentuckian — Cambrian’s then-owner, Booth.

Booth is a “treasured citizen,” “someone who has taken it upon himself to make an investment in the betterment of his community, county and state,” McConnell said. “Booth’s story is one of success in the free market, and a testimony to what can happen when a small business is given room to take root and grow.”

What prompted this 2012 outpouring by McConnell, one of the most powerful men in Washington, isn’t clear.

But Booth, named by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014 as one of “Kentucky’s top 10 ‘power players,’” is a reliable political donor who has supported many of the state’s key officials, including McConnell, Bevin and Beshear, the attorney general.

Bevin tried to unseat McConnell in the 2014 Republican primary, and Beshear—a Democrat—is running against Bevin in the governor’s race this year. But when it comes to coal, they’re on the same page.

Beshear took over his predecessor’s legal fight to block the Clean Power Plan. McConnell marshaled states across the country to resist the rule, and this year — five weeks after acknowledging that human activities are changing the climate—declined to bring up for a vote a bill to keep the U.S. from pulling out of the international agreement to slow global warming. Bevin tapped a former coal executive to head the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet and pressed an electric utility earlier this year not to close a coal plant.

Newton, the Beshear spokesman, wrote in an email that the attorney general bases his policy decisions on what he believes is best for Kentuckians.

McConnell, Bevin, and Booth didn’t respond to requests for comment. But as recently as this month, McConnell called the Clean Power Plan a “misguided,” “job-killing” and ineffective approach to addressing climate change. Bevin has argued that such rules would suffocate businesses and wouldn’t help anyone. And in a 2013 interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Booth said, “When we say there’s a war on coal, we’re sincere.”

The coal mining industry has sunk at least $2.2 million into state and federal Kentucky elections since 2012, according to data from the National Institute on Money in Politics. But these companies don’t need donations to get politicians on their side.

“In Kentucky, it’s more the perception,” said Erin Savage, a program manager for Appalachian Voices, an environmental group. “If you’re not a friend of coal, then you’re not going to get the votes.”

Despite the sector’s enduring political power, coal bankruptcies are mounting as competition from natural gas, solar and wind intensifies. That creates problems beyond job losses: Kentucky and states across the country haven’t required companies to set aside enough money to clean up mines when operations cease.

Mary Cromer, deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, worries that the fallout from rising bankruptcies and idled mines could mean more sites that increase flood risks. Her team, which represents coal miners, their families and others in Central Appalachia pro bono, can’t keep up with the demand for help as it is, she said....

==

big loss of topsoil midwest

---

619 dereg nation

also good

The Wall Street Journal reports that “a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are urging action on climate change, driven by shifting sentiment among GOP voters and the effects of global warming, from stronger hurricanes to more-destructive wildfires.”

According to the Journal, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz (author of a now-infamous memo on how to confuse and divide votersabout climate change) has warned Republicans that their obstruction and anti-science rhetoric are driving away voters, particularly younger conservatives.

great: flood survivors want answers for unnatural disasters

---

Trump Pushes a New Pipeline Permit as Floods Devastate Native American Tribes

Alleen Brown

---

==

mma 3/19

Climate change is often talked about in the media as some thing that will happen in the distant future. This characterization is dangerously misleading: The climate crisis is here now. And the effects are very real -- and incredibly devastating.

Climate change is behind the devastating flooding in the Midwest. The flooding has caused billions in damages, multiple deaths, and one Native American reservation has even been left without drinking water for weeks. A "bomb cyclone" led to massive flooding in the Midwest, and scientists are clear on the role climate change played. Climate scientist Michael Mann told MSNBC, "As the oceans warm up, there’s more moisture that’s available to these storms to turn into record rainfall. That’s what we saw with this bomb cyclone." That's not the only factor linking to climate change, either. The fluctuating jet stream and water on the ground as a result of record snow before the storm are both linked to climate change.

Media Matters' Evlondo Cooper looked at how the floods were covered, and as it turns out, none of this was mentioned in the network coverage of the flooding. Climate change never even was mentioned at all on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Cable news was barely better than that, and even newspaper coverage was barely adequate.

The corporate media has completely failed on the climate crisis. Regardless of whether it is a heat wave, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, outlets repeatedly refuse to connect the dots. It's time to stop portraying climate change as a problem for the future -- and to recognize it as a crisis we are dealing with now.

Also: One of the worst climate disasters was Hurricane Maria, in which at least 3,000 Americans died in Puerto Rico alone. And yet, Puerto Rico has consistently been under covered in televised media since the disaster, even as Trump alleged that the death toll itself was fake. In the past few weeks, network news has ignored that Trump has repeatedly called for reduced aid to Puerto Rico amid a food stamp crisis.

==

Water is life”: Midwestern floods threaten indigenous communities at forefront of climate crisis

by Amy Goodman March 24, 2019

As Nebraska and the U.S. Midwest recover from devastating climate change-fueled floods, we speak with Lakota historian Nick Estes on how two centuries of indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming…

==

FEMA Flood Maps Ignore Climate Change, and Homeowners Are Paying the Price

BY JAMES BRUGGERS

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/hawaii-hurricane-lane-flooding-2599467495.html

Although Hawaii avoided a direct hit by Hurricane Lane, which weakened to a tropical storm over the weekend, areas of the Big Island were inundated with waist-deep water and flash flooding.

Mountain View, located on the east side of the island, received a preliminary total of 51.53 inches of rain from Aug. 22-26—the third highest storm total rainfall from a tropical cyclone in the U.S. since 1950, according to theNational Weather Service.

The highest total is the 60.58 inches of rain dumped on Nederland, Texas during Hurricane Harvey last year. The second highest—and the highest tropical cyclone storm total rainfall in Hawaii—is the 52.00 inches measured at Kanalohuluhulu Ranger Station during Hurricane Hiki in 1950.

Authorities rescued 39 people from floodwaters on Friday and Saturday, the Associated Press reported. No storm-related deaths have been reported.

The heavy downpour triggeredlandslides, caused a road to collapse in Haiku and rendered the neighborhood inaccessible, and even opened up sinkholes.

Lane also dropped 36.76 inches of rain on Hilo Airport, the wettest four-day period ever observed at Hilo, with records dating back to 1949. Hilo also saw 15.00 inches of rain on Aug. 24, the fifth wettest calendar day on record.

"It was almost biblical proportions," state senator Kai Kahele, who represents the town of Hilo, told NBC News.

The National Weather Service lifted all remaining tropical storm warnings and watch advisories for the state on Sunday.

As Lane drifted away, Tropical Storm Miriam developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean, about 2000 miles east of the Hawaiian islands. But "Miriam is not expected to threaten any landmass," said AccuWeather Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski.

...

---

==

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012018/air-pollution-climate-research-weather-data-aerosol-particles-water-cycle-rainfall

---

bangladesh? pakistan 1/3 under wter, myanmar rohinga refugees?

9/17

climate disruption parenti tropic of chaos author 9/17 harney irma

https://kpfa.org/episode/behind-the-news-september-7-2017/

---

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/many-native-communities-are-being-forced-relocate-due-climate-change

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/intense-louisiana-rains-another-example-whats-store-global-warming-video

==

smoking gun?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032016/global-warming-climate-change-extreme-weather-drought-attribution-study

==

==

exec order but gop congr did not fight?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012016/congress-climate-change-omnibus-budget-bill-flood-standard-obama

President Obama's plan to safeguard the nation from increasing flood risk due to climate change was quietly green-lighted by Congress last month in the 2016 omnibus budget bill.

It marks one of the only actions Congress took on global warming in all of 2015, and it came as a surprise considering the longstanding opposition from Republicans. And it is a critical one, several policy experts said. It will impact billions of dollars of federally funded construction projects across the country, from highways and bridges to hospitals and housing complexes, at a time when flooding in the U.S. is getting worse every year because of climate change.

"The policy illustrates the awareness that we should not build things that are vulnerable to flooding now or in the future," said Rob Moore, a policy analyst and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Water and Climate Team. "That may not seem like a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is. We have a long history of building things that easily get soggy."

Obama's plan, executive order No. 13690, mandates that all federally funded projects located in a floodplain be built higher and stronger than previously required. It is the first update to the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard since the policy was created 38 years ago. It applies to both new construction and rebuilding following a disaster.

Under the old standards, enacted by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, buildings in the floodplain had to be elevated to the 100-year flood level. Under Obama's executive order, buildings must now be elevated 2 or 3 feet above the 100-year flood level (the higher standard is for "critical" infrastructure, like hospitals), or at the 500-year flood level. A third option is for federal agencies  to analyze future climate change scenarios and build according to those projections, such as for sea level rise or expected heavier rain events....

==

==

3. Fox News Turned To Disgraced Former FEMA Director Michael Brown To Deny Climate Change, Baselessly Attack FEMA Policy As “Orwellian”

On the May 6 edition of Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cavuto invited Michael Brown, the disgraced former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to attack FEMA for requiring that states applying for disaster preparedness funds produce plans that consider the impacts of climate change. Brown, whose claim to fame is botching the response to Hurricane Katrina, questioned the need for the policy by disputing that “man has much impact” on climate change, and echoed the misleading “climate is always changing”talking point by asserting: “[W]e’ve always had tornadoes, we’ve always had floods, we’ve always had hurricanes, and we’re always going to.” Brown also described the new FEMA policy is an “Orwellian” ploy meant to force the federal government’s “vision of climate change” on to states. Later, Brown admitted on Twitter that he is a “denier” when it comes to climate change.

==

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/intense-louisiana-rains-another-example-whats-store-global-warming-video

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/intense-louisiana-rains-another-example-whats-store-global-warming-video